Small government, strong families

Interview | Why libertarians should support family values—hint, What is the most basic nongovernment institution the world has ever known? And what grows in power and influence when that institution breaks down? | The Editors

Four more years for the Bush White House—and what will they be like? Much depends on whether the GOP coalition between people who care most about moral issues (often Christians) and people who push hardest for small government (often libertarians) can be maintained. The task seems hard because many economic libertarians are also social libertarians: They want easy divorce and sexual laissez faire. They oppose governmental pro-marriage policies.

Here’s where the analysis of Jennifer Roback Morse could prove influential. Jenny Morse is a well-informed economic libertarian: She earned a doctorate in economics and then taught for 15 years at Yale University and George Mason University. She also is pro-marriage and pro-family, and shows it in her own life: She left her full-time university teaching post in 1996 to move with her family (a husband and two young children, one of them adopted from Romania) to California. She is now a part-time Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and she and her husband are foster parents.